The loss of Hatchet, the revelation of what he had done, the sudden jolting Mantis presence—these had rocked Metropolis and made Killeen’s maneuvers possible. Hatchet had kept silent about his deals with the Crafter and what he saw on raids. Unlike the ancient Family rituals of tale-telling following a raid, Hatchet had confined talk to stories of their stealth. The Mantis’s depiction of what Hatchet was willing to do, the awful moment with the Fanny-thing—this had forever dirtied Hatchet’s memory

Killeen had all along phrased everything as mere possibility, as an exploration. Yet he knew when he marched out that he would never see Metropolis again. Even if the Argo had been a mere tale, he would not have gone back. Better to roam slow-dying Snowglade than to cower in a cage.

Still, he understood the sense of the majority that stayed. Fornax and Ledroff would make competent keepers. With the Mantis’s protection, Families could grow.

Humanity had always been dominated by the stay-behinds, Arthur had told him. It was a prudent strategy for the race, a heavy hedge on every daring bet. So none of the departing party had scorned the timid; wordlessly, with intuition born of hard trial, they understood.

The people gathered together on a bleak hillside to watch the Argo’s first flight.

It lifted with a rumble from the staging area around the burial site. Human hands had flown it into orbit long ago. The Argo had linked the Citadels with the Chandeliers. The ship used mech parts, linked solely to human commands. Its sensorium answered to telltale signatures of human thought processes and rejected mechspeak in any form.

So, though humans now knew nothing of things mechanical, once again human hands had to fly her.

Shibo had been the obvious choice. Her exskell could perform the deft, quick moves of piloting. And through her sensorium the Mantis could link the Argo’s ship-mind to her exskell.

Killeen sat beside her as she made the ship’s motors thrum and storm and thrum again. She had trained for days, with the Mantis’s help. Once routes and channels were laid down in her sensorium, the ship’s intricate self-sentient structures took over. They could interlock with her mechanical movements through the exskell.

Her hands flew swiftly among the command modules, her exskell buzzing. Anything done by word-level simple transmission of instructions would have been impossibly slow.

She took it well. A dim rivulet of the flow came to Killeen through the margins of his own sensorium. Raw touches and cutting smells and sour tastes, all scrambled and scratch-quick. Her face tightened with effort as she moved over the oblique board before her. At each step the ship verified that she was indeed human; an ancient security measure.

Her eyelids fluttered, her lips drew thin and pale.

“Heysay?” he whispered beside her.

“Getting it.” Words slipped from between clenched teeth.

“Leave off if you feel—”

“I can. I can do it.”

She seemed to be listening to far voices. Killeen felt the swirl of information funnel through her like an accelerating wind.

The ship whined higher. He felt a wobbling sensation.

“We’re clear,” she said, so faintly he could barely hear.

A drifting sensation swept over him. It was only a dim echo of what she endured but it told him of the data inputs from a thousand sensors. He felt himself lift and tilt and glide.

He had the sudden perception of looking down, straight down. A carved hillside hung below like gnawed fruit.

—Yeasay!— Cermo-the-Slow called faintly from below. —They’re flyin’.—

“You’re wonderful,” he said simply.

She sat at the board like a queen, the first human to master this strange artifact since the days of the Chandeliers. He knew the importance of it but could feel only the personal: his sudden love for her. Bursting liberation.

Having control of his own mind and being able to give of himself without constraint.

Unbidden, Arthur’s small voice, free of the Mantis, chirped:

You are now tapped in to her pheromones. These are molecular notches which must link up to excite the full level of male-female attraction. The Mantis undid the inset which the Family Bishop imposed on all. Do not mistake this for anything ethereal or intellectual. Fitting of such neural notches is unrelated to the lady’s social standing or your opinion of her. Mating proceeds not to express the higher functions within, unfortunately, but to please the great genetic pool lapping around us. I must say—

Killeen cut him off.

He and Toby walked beneath the twilight sky that evening, more to keep warm by moving than to see the endless workings of the mechs. The scuttling forms labored without sleep, refitting the Argo, gathering supplies, doing their own inexplicable research.

“How’s the Mantis get so many ’em workin’ for it?” Toby asked.

“It’s like a… a Cap’n for mechs,” Killeen finished, realizing that in fact he knew nothing of what the Mantis was.

“Think it’ll really let us go?’

“It better.”

“Don’t see why it should.” Toby frowned. Killeen saw in the boy’s face a struggling to understand that confirmed what had happened to him Inside the mechplex.

His son was changing with every passing day, thrust forward by the gravity of events to an early adulthood. A certain blithe assurance was gone from Toby, would never return. He would worry each odd point of the world now until he had it, understood it, could fit it in the scheme of things.

“We used the only weapon we had left,” Killeen said. “Vulnerability.”

“Don’t get it.”

Killeen hand-signaled to Toby to shut down his sensorium.

“All ’em?”

“Yeasay.” When they had only stunted, conventional senses, Killeen said, “If it kept us all in Metropolis we wouldn’t be the same.”

Toby blinked. “Huh?”

“Boxed in, we wouldn’t be true humans anymore.”

“Turn into porkers?”

“Yeasay. So fat, hafta get mechs in, cart us ’round.”

“All those people we left, they gone get fat, you figure?”

“Maybe. Not that that’ll bother the Mantis much. Way I figure it, Mantis’ll track us, too.”

“How?”

“Those micromechs.”

“Ummm.”

Toby stopped walking, hands in jacket pockets, his breath fogging the still air. “Heysay hear somethin’?”

Killeen saw the Mantis approaching from the Argo. “Kindle your systems. Don’t want it suspectin’.”

As his sensorium brightened he felt the hard outline of the Mantis intrude. He said as if in ordinary conversation, “Thing is, son, there’s something we lose…”

Laughter. That is the signature of your inner sense. That will die in the Metropolis.

Toby started, eyes big.

“Dammit!” Killeen shouted at the consuming dark around them. “I said before, don’t come in like that. We have a code, a right, privacy among ourselves.”

Yes—and that, too, is part of that “Something” you feel you would lose. This facet is related to your interior processing. I do not understand how this is so. It relates to your habits, of that I am sure. You must sleep to filter your experience of the world. This is typical of lower, naturally evolved forms.

Toby’s mouth twisted, his eyes narrowed. Killeen saw that rather than being scared, the boy already considered the Mantis an irritant. He understood this but knew it was dangerous. They were getting used to the Mantis. Thing about aliens is, they’re alien.

“So what you do, huh? Don’t sleep?” Toby demanded.

We process information in parallel systems while remaining conscious. Such clearing mechanisms as sleep and laughter we do not need.

Toby said derisively, “Must get on your nerves.”

Killeen said, “Don’t have any. Nerves, I mean.”

Toby shrugged. “Can’t be much fun.”

“Prob’ly isn’t,” Killeen agreed.